20-seiki shônen: Honkaku kagaku bôken eiga (20th Century Boys 1: Beginning of the End) (2008)
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33% of critics liked it
(12 reviews) -
67% of users liked it
(1,964 ratings)
A burned-out rocker discovers his doom-struck adolescent fantasies are coming true in this futuristic thriller from Japan. Ever since his career as a musician crashed and burned, Kenji (Toshiaki Karasawa) has been making a living working at a quick-stop store and living with his family. One day,… More A burned-out rocker discovers his doom-struck adolescent fantasies are coming true in this futuristic thriller from Japan. Ever since his career as a musician crashed and burned, Kenji (Toshiaki Karasawa) has been making a living working at a quick-stop store and living with his family. One day, police officers stop by and ask Kenji about a family of regular customers who've gone missing, though Kenji has hardly noticed their absence. When Kenji visits the home of the missing family, he notices a strange piece of graffiti on the wall, and is startled when he remembers it was the symbol of a club of teenage misfits he belonged to years ago. Kenji and his friends in the club created an amateur comic book that imagined an apocalyptic future in which strange illnesses and bands of armed insurgents threatened to destroy the world. As a wave of unexplained murders sweeps through the city, overseas the events of Kenji's old comic are beginning to come true; a fanatical cult known as Friend found the book and under the leadership of Sadakiyo they've made it their business to turn it into a reality, and now Kenji and his old friends have to infiltrate the cult and stop them before it's too late. 20-seiki shonen (aka 20th Century Boys) was adapted from a best selling manga by Naoki Urasawa and became a major box office hit in Japan. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Directed By
- Yukihiko Tsutsumi
- Written By
- Naoki Urasawa, Takashi Nagasaki, Yasushi Fukuda, Yusuke Watanabe
- Genres
- Art House & International, Science Fiction & Fantasy
- In Theaters
- Aug 30, 2008 Wide
Critic Reviews
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Trevor Johnston, Time Out
The ideas are fun, there are some striking design ideas (the villain's commonplace-yet-freaky mask), yet the clogged storytelling just doesn't make enough of them. Shame.
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Anton Bitel, Eye for Film
Tsutsumi...dazzles us with so many balls in the air, so many twists and turns, that there is not enough room left for his characters to develop as believable, interesting people, as opposed to comicbook archetypes.
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Sean Axmaker, Seanax.com
Not quite science fiction and as surreal a conspiratorial epic as you'll find, this dense thriller has a distinctively Japanese sensibility.
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Sarah Boslaugh, Playback:stl
...has that crazy mix of genres and conventions which you often find in Japanese film and has the added benefit of not taking itself too seriously.
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Edward Porter, Sunday Times (UK)
We're being reminded of the banality of evil, but that only slightly raises the IQ of Yukihiko Tsutsumi's film.
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